The Gauss Award is sponsored by the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), which is a collaboration of the German national supercomputing centers at Garching, Jülich and Stuttgart. The winner receives a cash prize of 3,000 €, courtesy of the Gauss Center, which is traditionally presented during the ISC Conference Opening Session. This year, the Gauss Award committee has selected a paper which reports on the outcome of a collaboration between the Chair for Computer Architecture and the HPC group at the computing center (RRZE) of FAU:

Johannes Hofmann, Georg Hager, and Dietmar Fey:

On the Accuracy and Usefulness of Analytic Energy Models for Contemporary Multicore Processors

In this paper we have expanded the execution-cache-memory (ECM) performance model developed at RRZE to describe more accurately the saturation behavior of memory-bound code when the number of cores in increased. Together with an improved power consumption model, which takes into account frequency- (and thus voltage-) dependent static power dissipation and the presence of a separate Uncore clock domain in recent Intel CPUs, we can now very accurately describe the performance and the energy consumption of steady-state loops over a wide range of clock frequency settings and core numbers. Although the paper mostly deals with Xeon Intel Sandy Bridge and Broadwell CPUs and “simple” kernels such as STREAM and DGEMM, our models work very well for other architectures (like, e.g., the AMD Epyc) and codes (such as stencil algorithms), too.

Johannes Hofmann will present our work during the ISC award session on June 25, 2018: https://2018.isc-program.com/?page_id=10&id=pap122&sess=sess201

The paper is available at DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-92040-5_2. You can download a (pre-review) preprint version at arXiv:1803.01618.